An openly bisexual, sword-wielding woman sneaks into a convent, rescues her involuntarily cloistered girlfriend, steals the corpse of a dead nun, and sets the abbey ablaze to cover their escape. No, this isn’t the opening scene of HBO Max’s latest ultraviolent hit; nor is it the plot of a book DeSantis’ minions have removed from school libraries. Rather, it’s merely one in a long list of unbelievable-but-true episodes in the life of Julie d’Aubigny, the outrageous late 17th-century opera star known as “La Maupin.”
D’Aubigny’s larger-than-life story is largely forgotten today, despite being the subject of numerous novels and plays, but this weekend Rogue Stage aims to make some noise on her behalf with their concert reading of Queen of Swords. I recently spoke with Thom Mesrobian, co-writer of the new rock musical, about the long road to its debut on March 24 and 25 during Timucua’s 2023 WordPlay Festival and his big hopes for its future.
Mesrobian is the producing director of Rogue Stage (“Polk County’s professional theater company”), and initially grabbed Orlando Fringe audiences’ attention with button-pushing parodies like 2014’s FrankenChrist: The Musical and 2016’s Trump/Hamilton parody Simpleton. More recently, he created and starred in the 2022 Critics Choice Award-winning Be a Pirate, which Mesrobian calls a “thinly veiled autobiography of my own life, where I had my dream of being a professional actor deferred until the age of 40.”
Sixteen years later, Mesrobian has worked for Disney and every other theme park, and is still employed as an entertainer at the Florida Aquarium — despite his actor father’s opposition to Mesrobian following in his footsteps.
“The feedback I had on Be a Pirate was humbling,” says Mesrobian. “I had one guy tell me that it didn’t just change the way he thought about storytelling, but the way he thought about being a father. … I think it just resonates with everybody — especially artists — who are always struggling with ‘what I want to be’ versus ‘what I have to do.'”
A similar tension drew Mesrobian to Julie d’Aubigny’s story, which he began developing into a musical in 2016 after stumbling upon a YouTube video recounting her more fantastical exploits. The cross-dressing prima donna of the Paris Opera was notorious for singing arias while dueling her conquests’ cuckolded husbands, and her arson-abetted escape (described above) instantly screamed “rock & roll” to Mesrobian. So he turned to his Simpleton collaborator, Ben Shepler (whom he first developed a relationship with while working at the now-defunct Holy Land Experience), who provided a song he’d written for his punk band in the early aughts. “It was just the sound that I wanted for the show. I heard it, I was like, ‘that’s it.’ I started writing lyrics to it. Three hours later, I had recorded them and send it back to him, and that was our first song.”
That initial burst of creativity was followed by “a ton of research on her life and what she experienced, trying to separate legend from fact, [and also] a lot of listening to my LGBT friends to understand what it would have been like to be a member of that community in the 1600s.” Initially intended as a fast Fringe followup to Simpleton, Mesrobian quickly found “that was just too restricting; I needed a cast of 20 [and] two and a half hours to tell all the stories. There’s no way to cut it down and do her justice.” In the end, he and Shepler have assembled 20 songs and “a good-sized book,” which they hope will come in under the three-plus hours of the first version they previewed five years ago.
While previous workshops of Queen of Swords were directed by Mark Hartfield, artistic director of Rogue Stage, this concert version is staged by acclaimed director Tara Kromer. “I felt it was really important to get some diversity into the creative team, to get some different voices to speak and to interpret the story,” says Mesrobian, who only knew Kromer by reputation before approaching her to helm this project. “I’m all about collaboration; I realize my own limitations and what I can do, and that there’s lots of other people around me who are as good or better at things than I am.”
That sentiment extends to Mesrobian’s partnership with Shepler, whom he credits with taking the basic melodies he “bangs out” on keyboard (which he admits “all tend to sound like Journey or Gin Blossoms”) and “bring[ing] that pop-rock and punk-rock sensibility into the show.” He compares the genre collision of Versailles and rock opera to Hamilton‘s mashup of the Founding Fathers with hip-hop, and envisions that in a fully staged production “the whole aesthetic of the show is going to be this blending of French style and everything from rock to ’80s New Wave.”
This Timucua concert is just the latest step in Queen of Swords‘ saga, which also includes a six-song EP released online in 2021. Mesrobian hopes investors or producers will attend this weekend’s concerts and share his vision for where the show could someday go: “One day I saw the story of Hadestown, which started as a six-song folk music EP,” says Mesrobian. “They performed in a hollowed-out bus in Vermont, and then 10 years later it won the Tony Award. If people can do that with Hadestown, I think I can do that with this show. I believe that much in the story.”
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This article appears in Mar 22-28, 2023.